First let me thank the devs for filling the hole that was left by EHM. I played EHM from the freeware days and each subsequent release, and I can say without a doubt that hockey sims are my favorite games to play. I cannot wait to try the full version of this...

I have not had the time I want to play the beta but one thing stood out at me in the short time that I did.... there seems to be no game rating statistic... forgive me if it's there and I missed it, I've spent most of the time browsing the game data and customization options (one of my favorite parts... hello NHL-Europa Champions League! )

Anyway... one of my favorite parts of EHM was the game rating feature. As I'm sure you're all very aware, each player was rated 3-10 (at least, 3 was the lowest I ever saw) for each game played. This, to me, was the most important statistic in the entire game, and one of the most important for any hockey sim.

Hockey cannot be as statistically broken down and analyzed as baseball. No knock on baseball, but almost everything that happens in baseball can be represented by a statistic. The same cannot be said for hockey.

There's no stat for "keep in's at blueline" for defenseman, or "won puck in corner" for a forward. Sometimes the only way to tell how well a player played is to actually have watched the game. The game rating was how you "watched" the game in EHM.

I remember so many times in EHM having to decide between a few players for roster spots and it coming down to average game rating. Even the things that CAN be broken down into stats do not tell the whole story, and nor will (or should) the player attributes. That is why a game rating stat is so crucial in my opinion.

I will post further thoughts on the game this week after I've played it a bunch... I am very impressed so far, and if the customization is anything like in OOTP the replay value will be unmatched.

While I agree that it would be nice to have some way to get a general idea of how well your players are playing, The rating system in EHM was flawed and if you followed it religiously you could end up not giving certain players the playing time they deserved. I think it would be very difficult to create a simple system that judged your players' performance in their assigned roles.

I agree with the original poster that some sort of game performance rating for each player should be provided. This is particularly important in a text-only description of games, since it is impossible to "see" how well each player is performing and we know that stats and commentary are not going to reflect that. I have played every version of Football Manager which provides good game graphics and a per game rating system for each player (as did EHM). Like hockey, soccer is a game that can't be reduced to statistics, so this rating is really the only way to determine how a player is performing. Many games are simmed and for the relatively few that are watched from beginning to end, no one goes through the effort of grading each player. Where we can't really 'see' any games being played out (as in FHM), I think it is pretty crucial that we have these ratings, warts and all.

I agree with hockeySauce. (You the hockeySauce on EA forums per chance?)

The thing about stats is a player could have a fantastic game and just have bad luck. (Finish -1 with no points.) It happens in real life all the time and the last thing I want to do is punish them for playing their game of the year.

I'd like to see a per-game player rating system as well, as long as it is better than EHM's was. Their system relied mostly on offensive stats (G/A/P/+-/Shots/Shots on target, which often made purely defensive players get ratings of 6 or less, which adversely affected their morale. If FHM can create a better system, I'm all for player ratings.

As mentioned above, there was a deficiency towards defensive players. Perhaps the rating could be linked to whatever role you have set a player to. If he's a 3rd line checker, his rating should reflect how well he played that role in a game.

The player rating system in EHM was a huge set back IMO. It destroyed the simulation aspect/attributes of the players, and turned it into a rating farm. No longer did people pay attention to the attributes/stats of the players, but the ratings they received in their respective league.

I know this because I played EHM since it's conception. Coaches and GM's do NOT have a "rating system" to go off of in real life. If someone says they do, they are liars.

If you wan't an enforcer, find a guy with a generous hit count. If you wan't a goal scorer, find a guy who...scores goals. It's actually really that simple. As for the concern of player "luck", there is an easy way to determine this. Give the player a 10-15 game tryout on your roster. 1 or 2 games is two small of a sample size to determine if the player is at his proper form.

Read stats and attributes, don't be lazy. It is a simulator after all.

I guess I'm not the only one to have seen "24/7, Road to the Winter Classic" on this forum. In the first series (Penguins/Capitals) you see Dan Bylsma and a couple of coaches going through each player, grading them for the last game. I think it's a 5 star system.

Instead of a "stat-like" number to be displayed on each players profile, perhaps you could have a lot more backroom reports - and you would have to look at multiple reports to find tendencies (or in other words; form)

I guess I'm not the only one to have seen "24/7, Road to the Winter Classic" on this forum. In the first series (Penguins/Capitals) you see Dan Bylsma and a couple of coaches going through each player, grading them for the last game. I think it's a 5 star system.

Instead of a "stat-like" number to be displayed on each players profile, perhaps you could have a lot more backroom reports - and you would have to look at multiple reports to find tendencies (or in other words; form)

If, like Dan Bylsma, the game can reason and offer an explanation as to why a player was given, say, 4/5 for the game, I'm all for it. Otherwise I'm not sure I see the point. I really fail to see how a coach giving you a star rating for a particular game helps you identify what playerX did right and what he did wrong any better. And if you are a GM and you want to base your decisions around some rating that your coach gave you, without having any clue what are the problems/good things that led to that rating, well that just sounds really wrong.

I think the player rating can make the game a lot more accessible to users who may be intimidated by all the stats.

I downloaded OOTP13 back in November in preparation for FHM. However, I don't know much about baseball, in particular the importance of an overwhelming amount of stats. Having a player rating would at least get a newbie through the beginner stages, and eventually you would start to understand the stats.

The player rating system in EHM was a huge set back IMO. It destroyed the simulation aspect/attributes of the players, and turned it into a rating farm. No longer did people pay attention to the attributes/stats of the players, but the ratings they received in their respective league.

Yeah this was a major difficulty with EHM. It was all too easy to sign players with an average rating of 7.00+ from a league of a similar quality as yours and know they'll play okay. Another criticism is that the ratings seemed skewed in favour of offensive performance (but then the game was somewhat skewed in this way in general, IMO).

I think a rating system would be useful in FHM. It's difficult to evaluate the performance of your players without going through the text commentary and stats for every single game with a tooth comb trying to figure out which players did well and badly. This would suck the fun out for me.

This has been discussed previously by others in previous threads, but I'm the fan of the idea of there being a rough rating for players. Perhaps your head coach / assistant coach could rate the players' performances each game. The accuracy of the rating would depend on the coach's relevant attributes - and even the very best coaches should be susceptible to being inaccurate. So the rating would become a very rough rating to get an idea of how a player performed relative to the other players in that particular game rather than it being an accurate benchmark by which to grade every other player in the league, let alone in the world.

Quote:

Originally Posted by duari91

Coaches and GM's do NOT have a "rating system" to go off of in real life. If someone says they do, they are liars.

As mentioned by Skadhauge, the Pens can be seen using a simple rating system in the HBO 24/7 fly-on-the-wall documentary. It didn't appear to be anything scientific; it seemed it was more a way of roughly evaluating how well a player performed each game. My guess is that if a player was getting a lot of low ratings, they'd consider moving them to their farm team / switching lines, etc. I'm sure it wasn't a decisive rating, just more of a tool to help evaluate players' performance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by duari91

If you wan't an enforcer, find a guy with a generous hit count. If you wan't a goal scorer, find a guy who...scores goals. It's actually really that simple. As for the concern of player "luck", there is an easy way to determine this. Give the player a 10-15 game tryout on your roster. 1 or 2 games is two small of a sample size to determine if the player is at his proper form.

Read stats and attributes, don't be lazy. It is a simulator after all.

I don't think you can necessarily rely on stats like that to determine how good a player is. Hockey isn't like baseball where stats are highly indicative of a player's ability. If it were that easy, we could input all of the NHL player stats and generate appropriate in game ratings for them. But we can't and hence we need researchers to manually rate players' abilities.

I do agree that stats can help, but I don't think they paint anywhere near a full or accurate picture.

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This has been discussed previously by others in previous threads, but I'm the fan of the idea of there being a rough rating for players. Perhaps your head coach / assistant coach could rate the players' performances each game. The accuracy of the rating would depend on the coach's relevant attributes - and even the very best coaches should be susceptible to being inaccurate. So the rating would become a very rough rating to get an idea of how a player performed relative to the other players in that particular game rather than it being an accurate benchmark by which to grade every other player in the league, let alone in the world.

I like this idea of a game rating using a coach's relevant attributes. I would add to it that the ratings be only viewed by my team and I cannot view other team's ratings. I of course can view ratings against a team I just played from my coaches point of view.

Also if I want to see ratings from another team/player, I have to assign a scout to track that team/player but subject to the assigned scouts relevant attributes. And the only rating I will see is for the few games the scout assesses the team/player. This would be a benefit to track a team you are likely to play in the first round of the playoffs, for instance.

It is shortsighted to think coaches don't grade/rate players. Players are continually assessed and graded their entire career. It is how a coach decides which guy is going and who is not. Also what areas a player needs to develop more. Whether it is a number grade, letter grade or some other method, rating players is used internally. And hence I should be able to see my team ratings for game play. Ideally I would like a offence, defense and effort rating. That way I can judge what training needs to be applied and who needs a 'chat' about effort. Again these ratings subject to my coaches ability to give me this data.

I prefer the game without any fictive ratings with no base in actual statistics. When more advanced statistics like Corsi/Fenwick. Quality of Competition or GVT etc will be added there will be plenty of information to evaluate a player. You also have the attributes and scouts to help you, it should be enough.

If ratings are eventually added I hope it will be possible to hide them from the game.

Unfortunately, the Penguins using a "star rating" is not the same as a numbered overall rating. Not to mention, a computer is perfect, and cannot lie. In other words, when EHM says a players has a 8.0 avr, I know it is telling me the truth.

When a human gives me 3 stars/5 in a hockey game, I can take that as I did a decent job. How do you think the coach comes up with those star ratings? If a player scores a goal and gets an assist, do you think he will get a high star rating?

I think people need to look at stats, and make a common sense decision about the players.

It would be okay to have the coach give you a report and say "this player has been playing good lately - I think he should be a part of the team", but NOT okay to turn this game into a rating farm.

EDIT- Don't forget this game already has a "star" rating next to player names.

If coaches are going to give ratings then the better the quality of a coach in an area of expertise, then the better the rating.
For example a coach might be good in evaluating offensive play or talent but terrible for defense, then the coach would give more accurate ratings for offense than for defense.
Also the ratings should be very general, such as 4 out of 5, not 4.1 out of 5 or 3.6 out of 5. It would be difficult for an actual coach to give too specific a rating to a player.

This has been discussed previously by others in previous threads, but I'm the fan of the idea of there being a rough rating for players. Perhaps your head coach / assistant coach could rate the players' performances each game. The accuracy of the rating would depend on the coach's relevant attributes - and even the very best coaches should be susceptible to being inaccurate. So the rating would become a very rough rating to get an idea of how a player performed relative to the other players in that particular game rather than it being an accurate benchmark by which to grade every other player in the league, let alone in the world.

I really like this concept.

As mentioned, at the moment it is quite difficult to determine how an individual player performed his role on a game-by-game basis.

Just to clarify, I would like a game rating for a game played based on the players individual skill level. I do not like the idea of EHM's avg game rating system. For example, if a third line player played to the best of his ability he would score an '5/5'. This would not mean this player is a 5/5 player in the game. This just means this player is playing to the best of his abilities. He will not replace an all star player. A letter grade from the coach for the last game played may be a better choice, less confusion. Then if a player scores a low grade, you can then research the stats to see where he is failing.

EHM's avg rating system really ended up being an overall player rating. Higher the rating, the better the player. That was a mistake. I would rather see a rating based on his effort in game in relation to his overall skill level. Because I cannot visually see who performing, a coaches player grade would be beneficial.

Perhaps there is a different approach that can be taken. If the objective of the game rating stat is to allow the GM (player) to see how the player is performing in game situations, since the stats do not tell the full story (especially defensively), then it should actually look at the game situations.

Each time certain key ratings/attributes are tested with a dice roll (or the sim engine equivalent) it would record the success/failure rate. Naturally players with higher ratings will win more of those "battles" than those with lower ratings. But this can give a better picture of how well the player did both offensively and defensively, it doesn't ruin the concept of player evaluation, but nor does it generalize with a subjective game rating or average rating.

These player attributes stats can be collected by game, by week, by season etc to perhaps show trends where players are performing well.

They can also be used to see if perhaps a player is being used in the wrong role, if he is losing certain types of battles too often.

This is a different approach but I thought I'd put it out there for consideration.

As someone who has been playing Football manager for nearly 20 years (beginning with Championship Manager Italia for those who are connoisseurs) I can see the pros and cons of ratings clearly. When I first began playing, with no d or 3d representation, I took the performance ratings very seriously. This was almost like a beginners way to play because I found after about a year I stopped using the average ratings in favour of the player profile ratings. Now the only use for ratings is to see if there has been a notable drop-off in form.

What I would like to see is on each player's profile a form tab. Inside it will be a star rating from 1 - 5 for the matches played that season, along with key stats alongside it, similar to how season stats are currently displayed line-by-line. The star ratings will be done by the coaches and therefore can be inaccurate as suggested by an earlier poster.

I would also like the ratings to vary according to the role the player has.

e.g. my 7 minute a night 4th line sparkplug should get a higher rating for 8 shifts with a +1 and an assist plus a couple of big hits than a Sidney Crosby type. If you set a player's role as primary scoring and they blank with a -1 that should be a bigger deal and a far lower rating than for an enforcer with similar stats.

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